In Remembrance

“This day shall be for you a memorial day, and you shall keep it as a feast to the Lord.”

Exodus 12:14

The Exodus story is one of the Bible’s most vivid and dramatic narratives.  The wickedness of Pharaoh, the steadfast courage of Moses, the horrors of the plagues, the spectacle of the the Red Sea’s high waves, frozen in place—they almost seem, to us to demand a screenplay.  There have been plenty of Exodus movies, from Cecil DeMille’s great 1956 epic The Ten Commandments, to the animated Prince of Egypt, a favorite in our household.  Earlier this week, I asked my sons if they knew about the ten plagues, and was very impressed when they could reel off all ten of them.  “Did you cover that in Sunday School?” I asked.  “No dad,” came the response—"it’s in the movie.”

I didn’t ask them if they had been reading about the Exodus directly from the Bible. But if they had tried, they would have found a story paced quite differently from any film I’ve seen.[1]  It’s not that the filmmakers need to invent lots of episodes.  All the powerful stuff comes right off the pages.  It’s that they usually leave out much of what the Book of Exodus actually says. 

Ponder: the spacious dome of mercy

"Justice is good.  It is the foundation of existence.  But there is something higher than justice, the bountiful widening of the heart to mercy.  Justice is clear, but one step further and it becomes cold.  Mercy is genuine, heartfelt; when backed by character, it warms and redeems.  Justice regulates, orders existence; mercy creates.  Justice satisfies the mind that all is as it should be, but from mercy leaps the joy of creative life.  That is why it is written that heaven rejoices more over one sinner who repents than over a hundred just who have no need of it.  High above all the stupidity and evil of mankind arches the spacious dome of mercy."

Romano Guardini, The Lord (1954), 259.

Wretched man that I am

“Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?  Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”  Romans 7:24-25

The Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle stories are favorites on our boys’ bookshelves.  They are set in a pleasant suburb in the mid-fifties, the sort of place where mothers have always just taken sugar cookies out of the oven and daddies are headed out after work to finish the new treehouse ladder.  The stories are populated with children—accomplished, good natured, obedient children—who just happen to be passing through unfortunate phases.

Take Nicholas Semicolon, subject of the story Philip read to all of us as we made our way across Maine last week.  Nicholas is ten, large and strong for his age, the apple of his mother’s eye.  But he also happens to have become a thoroughly rotten bully.  He hits girls and pulls dog’s tails, upsets baby carriages and speaks rudely to everyone he meets.  His parents have been blissfully ignorant about all of this until they receive a call from Mrs. Eager, whose son’s legs are covered in bandages after little Nicky’s latest attack.

Ponder: "he meant to give copious redemption"

“[Thomas Aquinas] says that the very least one of these sufferings was of itself suffering enough to redeem the human race from all sin (that is woven into the Adoro Te).  But, says St. Thomas, it was fitting that He should have to endure all at once.  One suffering would have sufficed for our Redemption, but it would not suffice for the Love of the Redeemer.  He meant to give copious Redemption.  He willed that the beaker should brim over.  He gave a thousand Redemptions all in one.”

Vincent McNabb, OP, The Craft of Suffering (1936), 79.

Ponder:"as the First Man partook of it, so must the last"

"Christian Redemption is God's mercy to all Mankind; but it could not be so, if every fallen Man, as such, had not some Fitness and Capacity to lay hold of it.  It must have no Dependence upon Times and Place, or the Ages and several Conditions of the World, or any outward Circumstance of Life; as the First Man partook of it, so must the last; the learned Linguist, and the Blind, the Deaf and Dumb have but one and the same common Way of finding Life in it.  And he that writes large Commentaries upon the whole Bible, must be saved by something full as different from Book knowledge, as they were, who lived when there was neither Book nor any Alphabet in the world...It must be something as grounded in human Nature, as the Fall itself is, which wants no Art to make it known; but to which the common Nature of Man is the only Guide in one Man, as well as another.  Now this something, which is thus obvious to every Man, and which opens the Way to Christian Redemption in every Soul is, a sense of the Vanity and Misery of this World; and a Prayer of Faith and Hope to God, to be raised to a better State.

William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728).

Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

“So you also must consider yourself dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.” 

Romans 6:11

“Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia!”  We have been waiting six weeks to hear those words, and only just now we proclaimed them, and the lights went on, and we sang a hymn of praise, and read the Easter Gospel.  Alleluia, for Christ is risen!  “Praise to the Lord,” that’s what it means, “Praise to the Lord.”  It’s the same in both English and Spanish, because it comes from Hebrew, the language of God’s ancient people.  It’s the shout of victory, the joyful song of the redeemed.  “Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia!”

Adrienn, our new musician here, has so graciously stepped in to play for us tonight.  And besides her excellent work on the piano and with the choirs, she is an instrumentalist, a teacher of strings.  Because she’s a violinist, she knows a great deal about fugues.  Fugues are musical selections in which a given theme, stated at the beginning, is repeated in a seemingly endless series of variations.  Bach wrote some of the finest ones, and occasionally we hear one as a postlude on Sunday morning.   As we repeat the theme in a fugue, we gradually become aware of dimensions and possibilities within the original melody that we hadn’t noticed before.  The melody comes to take on a new kind of life, with increasing complexity and power.  And as the fugue unfolds, the pace speeds up and grows louder, until it settles on a great resounding chord, all the stops pulled, a sound as big as glory.  That’s what tonight is all about.  It’s all one grand fugue, this Easter Vigil, and here’s the melody: “Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.” 

Happy Infant, Early Blest

“We have escaped like a bird from the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken, and we have escaped.”  Psalm 124:7

A few yards from the door of this chapel lies the grave of Samuel Griffin, the first person to be buried on this spot.  He died on October 11, 1792, accidentally drowned in the lake at the age of four years, six months.  On his stone, you can still barely pick out the epitaph verses:

            Happy infant, early blest

            Here in peaceful slumber rest

            Early rescu’d from the cares

            Which increase with growing years.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I find that epitaph hard to swallow.  It’s hard for me to imagine those as the words chosen by his mother, the ones that seemed to fit best as she held him dripping and cold in her lap at the shore of the lake. 

I guess it just sounds too easy.  Killed tragically while still a young boy, his whole life ahead of him—is that “happy infant, early blest.”  I’m sure they tried their best, but no one could save him, he had to die in such a frightening way—is that really “early rescued from the cares?”  Surely these words would speak only to someone who wasn’t ready to be honest about the real devastation of such a death—surely they’re trying to put a bright face on things when everything is falling apart inside?  

O Key of David

O Key of David and Sceptre of the house of Israel, Who dost open and no man doth shut, Who dost shut and no man doth open, come and bring forth from his prisonhouse the captive that sitteth in darkness and in the shadow of death.

He would turn up for the grand occasions in the Chapel when I was a student at Duke.  He was an old man, very distinguished with a craggy face, an emeritus professor of chemistry.  His doctoral robe was Harvard Crimson, and he wore a velvet cap.  And he carried an enormous jeweled staff, with a wide silver head, the mace of the University.  His title was the University Marshall, and that staff represented, I think, the teaching authority.  He bore on behalf of the faculty, who had chosen them to represent him.  When he carried it in on Matriculation Ceremony, or on Founders’ Day or for Baccalaureate, and laid it upon the Altar, it announced to all of us that the university could now get about its business, that the teachers would teach, that students could learn.  He walked very slowly, because he knew that everyone had to wait for him.  His mace was the key that opened the proceedings of a great university.